The MPAA today issued lawsuits against 6 torrent sites that publish trackers for TV shows. Fucking idiots. They claim that downloading TV shows is stealing copyright. No it's bloody not. If it was, we'd all be in jail for owning DVRs and VCRs. And eyeballs. The MPAA claim that it hurts the sales and prospects for overseas transmission. Well that I could agree with if it were true. But for example, I'd like the MPAA to please tell me which US network is going to pick up and air the BBC Sci Fi series "Dr. Who". Anyone? Anyone? No - exactly. There's not one network that will pick it up. The BBC will sell it on DVD but thanks to the MPAA it will be region-encoded. So how, exactly, am I supposed to watch it ? With the torrents, I can download it and watch it at home, here in America. Does that hurt anyone? No. Does it steal copyright? No - there's no difference between that and someone ripping it to CD and mailing it to me in the post. Does it harm future sales? No because it will never see the light of day on American TV.Fucking idiots. They don't know ANYTHING.

May 11th, and it snowed on the valley floor today - almost an inch. Thick, heavy, wet snow which melted off by the afternoon, but enough of it to clout the gardens and snap some trees. I was out this morning trying to rescue some very bent tree limbs. I think they'll be OK..

The award for dumbass commercial of the day goes to Saturn today. We saw their new commercial on TV last night (ran out of buffer on the DVR so couldn't skip it). It's a guy saying "I could have spent the money on a BMW Z4, but then I'd have had a slower car," as he gets into a Saturn Ion. The small print says "claim based on 0-40 time". Great. So in the extremely narrow and never-measured 0-40mph time bracket, the Ion is the faster car. But in 0-60, 0-80, 0-90 and 0-120, the BMW is. The Ion probably can't reach 120....The BMW is also the better handling, better looking, less-depreciating vehicle. You Saturn marketing guys need to give some serious consideration to just how stupid this commercial make you look, as a company.

Kudos to GenieSoft, the makers of Backup Manager Home and Pro. I bought a Home license and was having a lot of problems with it indexing my drives before backing up. They walked me through a couple of fixes via their helpdesk system and in the end upgraded me to a Pro license for free. The Pro version fixed all my problems. Free plug, then, to GenieSoft.

In your best Homer Simpson voice "ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!"Well it may not be thrilling news for you, dear reader, but for me, a die-hard fan of the cheese-tastic 80's flick "License To Drive", it seems 20th Century Fox listened to public opinion / online petitions etc, and released it! Proper widescreen version, remastered video and digital sound. Could this be better news for me today? I submit that it could not :-)

Our cat has had some problems over the weekend and we don't know what's causing it. She's been sick (badly this morning) overnight each night, yet otherwise seems to be a healthy cat. We're both a bit worried that there's something ailing her that we don't know about, but she doesn't show any signs of health problems :(